![]() ![]() Hemingway’s tale evoked the core activity of our life in Montana: trout fishing. My parents hailed from Montana, where we spent our summers, and they both worked at the University of Chicago, my father as a professor of English and my mother as an administrator for the university’s medical center. With one of these, you can collect nippers in water that is up to a metre deep.When I was a youngster struggling to reconcile a life split between a great community of learning in the Midwest and a log cabin in Montana, my father gave me Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” to read. If the water is too deep to use a floating strainer, try a butterfly net. ![]() To combat this, some collectors use elaborate floating strainers that they pump their contents into thus trapping anything extracted. However, this action creates mud, which can make it hard to see them, especially when the water is deeper than a few centimetres. If the sand you are pumping is covered in a bit of water, you can pump it into the water and then keep an eye peeled for nippers trying to swim away, picking them up as you see them. If the tide is out you can just pump it onto the sand next to you, picking up any nippers you see squirming in the sand slurry. Once you have collected a pump full of watery sand, you need to consider where to pump it out. This is because the water table is too low and you can’t reach it. The only time pumping becomes difficult is at the bottom or lower end of the tide, especially big tides, when the flats are drained. Basically, you can collect nippers any time provided the tunnels are filled with water. There are also many schools of thought on the best time to pump nipper. More importantly, the pump can’t create a vacuum in sand alone so you won’t be able to draw anything into the pump. If they don’t, they probably won’t have any nippers in them. The key to successful pumping is that the tunnels you are pumping must have water in them. Once the pump is full, it’s withdrawn from the sand and squirted out, exposing any nippers you’ve sucked up. ![]() Rather than using it for plunging, the vacuum seal allows you to suck sand and water – and hopefully nippers – into the pump. The pump is just a tube with a vacuum-sealed plunger. There are several brands but they are pretty unique to Australia. I’m sure that somewhere, someone has invented a different method for extracting nippers, but the only way I know is to use a specialised nipper pump. So now you know where, you need to know how. If you’re collecting while there is water covering the holes, if you see slight puffs of sand coming out of a hole, this is almost a guarantee that there is a nipper at home in that hole. I only do this because that’s what I was told when I first learnt about catching nippers. The holes I like to concentrate on are two small holes side by side. Healthy nipper flats will be covered in holes. Then you need to narrow down where to start actually catching them. Understanding the information above will help you identify the most likely areas to find nippers. ![]() There is still a water table that exists beneath the exposed sand, which keeps the tunnels filled with water. This is still the case even when the sand flats are dry and exposed. While they have legs, they actually swim through their water-filled tunnels. Nippers live in sand rather than mud and commute around via tunnels, hence the need to be in the intertidal zone. An “intertidal zone” is one where during a normal tidal fluctuation water covers it during periods of rising tide but exposes it during falling tides. They live beneath the sand in the intertidal estuary zones. To effectively collect your own nippers, you need to understand a bit about them and their environment. ![]()
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